Theresa Chien

About a year ago, I gave a talk to a small group of mostly indie and small-studio game developers about how to incorporate the UI process into their games, and one of the pieces of advice I haphazardly slapped on an ending slide was, “Think like a player [when looking at the UI for your game].” Essentially, I was asking developers to remove themselves from the game that they had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. To the surprise of probably no one, the first question I got was, “How do I do that?” So, how do you do it? Let's say you have a Store for your game, and it's really important because, well, it pays the bills. You want to find out if the button to the Store is easily found. But you had added the button months ago, have play-tested the game every day since then, and now can find it with your eyes closed. How do you go from being the person who knows this game the best, into someone who knows the least? There